What Cross-Browser issues have you faced? [closed]

Answer 1

While developing a system tests framework for a web app we had to simulate various events such as clicks. I remember that we couldn't find any normal way to do it in IE and FF and had to implement it in two different ways with a lot of voodoo around.

I don't remember the specifics, but I remember that it was really annoying.

Answer 2

IE's restrictions on using DOM manipulations on tables forced me to take a completely different approach to something. Very frustrating at the start, but the positive out of it was that the second approach was ultimately better, so I suppose I should be grateful to IE. ;)

Answer 3

My biggest problem are browser makers. Arrogant little *^&%s. I mean, you can't sell a browser to anybody, yet everyone is in their little corner trying to out do each other, only creating division. Oh and Chrome. Chrome still doesn't know what it wants to be, Safari or Firefox. Aside from its one parlor trick, its practically useless. I blame all you guys who kept googling just because you hate monopolies. Guess what, they're the monopoly now. Now we can all enjoy second rate, prematurely launched software.

This mostly stems from a bug* I had in Chrome today, it never dawned on me to query the browser. Both Safari and Chrome were failing so I figured hey, once I fixed the Safari problem Chrome would be fixed automatically, but oh no no. Mr."I run tabs in seperate processes" AKA "Sr. No full screen" just had to hold me in the lizard lock with its mind boggling implementation.

I also detest Firefox. I can't tell whether I have a virus infestation or Firebug running. Now until Adobe decides to release a browser that makes Flash practical for things other than movie clips I'm pretty much going to have something to bitch about for a long time. And we all know that's what life is all about.

Also, I only enjoy programming when I encounter ridiculous bugs that make my brain juices run.

Answer 4

For Firefox, to get the full data you either need to use node.normalize before you call node.firstChild or use node.textContent, both of which are Mozilla specific methods

Actually all of those are W3C DOM methods supported by the vast majority of browsers. I think you'll find they also work in IE.

My biggest cross-browser issue is that there are people out there still using IE.

Second biggest is that even in standards-following browsers, doing some things in CSS is still impossible; for instance tbody {overflow:auto} does nothing useful in anything but Gecko, and even there it has bugs.

Answer 5

I was working on CSS layout written by someone who thought that the size given to an element is size+padding+border like in IE5 and not only the content box as explained in official specification. It was written only a few month ago so he did dirty hacks to make it look well in IE7. It took me several hours with FireBug to track down the source of the problem and by the time I realized it I was really annoyed.

If you open site with "floating" CSS written for IE5 in Firefox the boxes just do not have enough space to fit and fall down the page. If you open it in IE7 it looks nice as IE7 lets the borders overlap so it looks almost correct. For someone as inexperienced as me it was hard to note.

Answer 6

Biggest Cross-Browser Issue? - Internet Explorer!

<start_grumpy>

IE is solely responsible for "holding back the web" - us developers can't create amazing sites using HTML5, or SVG, or XFORMS, or CANVAS... not because of Firefox,Safari or Chrome, but because 2/3s of the Internet is still stuck on IE. Not to mention that ~20% of the web is still stuck on IE6! IE8 is the first version of IE to at least try to be standards compatible (2001's standards that is), which means it will be at least 2018 before we can finally start dropping all support for IE7.

</start_grumpy>

Otherwise name a DOM method that IE fully supports... the fact that this is a hard question to answer is my biggest CrossBrowser issue.

getElementById() - badly broken
getElementsByName() - buggy
getElementsByTagName() - buggy
getAttribute() - buggy
setAttribute() - majorly broken
createElement() - buggy
appendChild() - buggy

even things IE invented are messed up...

innerHTML (getting) - returns the worst markup possible
innerHTML (setting) - doesn't work on the elements you'd want to dump a bunch of data into (e.g. Tables and Selects)